The present disclosure relates generally to an edge refinement system.
Barcodes are a popular means for encoding information in printed matter; however, they are overt and often unsightly. If an image is to be a part of the composition of the printed label or page, a viable alternate to using a barcode is to hide information in the image. It has been found that information may be encoded in the halftone of an image, using techniques such as cluster-dot halftoning. The process takes any grayscale image and a payload of data to be encoded therein as input, and produces a bitonal clustered-dot halftone of that image with selected halftone clusters shifted to carry a varying number of bits from the payload. The result is a data-bearing steganographic halftone (i.e., stegatone). The small size and large number of clustered-dot cells in printed halftones allow the printer/encoded bit density to be quite high, typically over 2000 bytes/square-inch. The carrier cells of the data-bearing steganographic halftone are forced to be a uniform shape to allow for reliable recovery of the shift information. This is accomplished by setting all pixel values to the average value of pixels in that cell. As such, carrier cells sacrifice some detail rendition in favor of storing recoverable data. In contrast, non-data carrying cells are not flattened, and thus retain as much detail as possible in the final rendering of the image.